How good is this TV show? How good is this TV show!!! We love it! So you think you can DANCEdancendancedancedance...... (Any show with an echo effect in its theme song title has got to be great, right?)

The setup of the show is so fricken brilliant: An equal number of guys and girls, all of whom dance in different styles, including but not limited to: ballroom, ballet, the ubiquitous hip-hop, jazz, and "lyrical" (which we think is supposed to mean modern, but is best portrayed by the guy who to dance on at his audition). Every week they pick random partners and learn the choreography for a randomly-selected dance style, for your viewing delight. Then the three (though starting this week, two) worst-performing couples are then selected to do a 45-second solo and America votes off the one they like the least.

Dude, genius is not too strong a word to describe watching, say, the freestyler and the ballroom dancer gamely struggling to get through the "lyrical" choreography. Spirit fingers! Gasp as the pop-and-locker and the tap dancer flail their way through the mambo! Shriek in horror as the wind machine blows open a diaphanous untucked shirt to expose pale male dancer chest! And cheeeeez, could these judges be any meaner? Clearly choreography is the career path of choice if you like to talk smack. (They were even better when they got to talk more in the earlier weeks. "They named this show right. These people THINK they can dance." Owwwwwwch! More, please!) We are glued to the TV. Glued!

Bay Area connection? Four dancers hail from this neck of the -ist: lovable hip-hopper of size Allan Frias, who grew up in the Bayview and teaches dance at Dance Mission; hollow-staring Slavic ballroom dancer Artem Chigvinsev from Palo Alto who teaches at Metronome Ballroom; cheerful Pinoy jazz dancer Melody Lacayanga from Daly City; and Nick Lazzarini from Sunnyvale, who we really have no memory of at all. (sorry, Nick! Did you dance a hip-hop routine, maybe?)

So hey, don't call us anymore on Wednesdays between 8 and 10. We're not picking up!

brought in his own mattress